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Tuesday, September 02, 2025

President Donald Trump's original 50-day deadline he gave Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war he started in Ukraine has expired, with no end in sight to the fighting. On July 14, the U.S. president threatened "secondary tariffs" on Russia if Putin did not agree to a deal to end the war in the 50-day timeframe which has just ended. Since then, Trump revised down the deadline to 10-12 days and there has been a meeting between the U.S. and Russian leaders in Alaska. However, the White House has not announced any economic measures to punish Putin directly linked to not meeting the deadline. Yuriy Boyechko, CEO of Hope for Ukraine, which supports frontline communities caught up in the war, told Newsweek Tuesday that Trump's deadline had "produced no progress toward peace." Newsweek has contacted the White House for comment.


The arrest of a US army veteran who protested against the Trump administration's immigration crackdown has raised alarms among legal experts and fellow veterans familiar with his service in Afghanistan. Bajun Mavalwalla II " a former army sergeant who survived a roadside bomb blast on a special operations mission in Afghanistan " was charged in July with "conspiracy to impede or injure officers" after joining a demonstration against federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in Spokane, Washington. Legal experts say the case marks an escalation in the administration's attacks on first amendment rights. Afghanistan war veterans who know him say the case against Mavalwalla appears unjust.


A federal judge on Tuesday barred President Donald Trump from deploying National Guard troops in California to execute law-enforcement actions there, including making arrests, searching locations, and crowd control. The ruling came in connection with a lawsuit by the state of California challenging Trump's deployment of the Guard to deal with protests in Los Angeles over the Trump administration's immigration enforcement policies. Judge Charles Breyer said that Trump's deployment of the troops violated the federal Posse Comitatus Act.


To me, there are six clear reasons we should be talking about this more than we are and why the press corps should be digging more deeply and more seriously around this topic.


Sunday, August 31, 2025

Inflation edged higher in July, according to the Federal Reserve's preferred inflation measure, indicating that President Donald Trump's tariffs are working their way through the U.S. economy. read more


Comments

1) The bruised hands. The puzzle of Trump's badly bruised and heavily make-up-ed hands has been one of the summer's odder presidential story lines. The White House has maintained that the bruises come from how much Trump loves shaking hands. "President Trump is a man of the people and he meets more Americans and shakes their hands on a daily basis than any other President in history. His commitment is unwavering and he proves that every single day," Karoline Leavitt said.

White House physician Sean Barbabella breezily dismissed the bruising in a memo, saying it was "benign" and "consistent with minor soft tissue irritation from frequent handshaking," but there's reason to believe there's more to it than that. For one thing, the bruising isn't limited to his dominant handshaking hand; it also has been a regularly recurring phenomenon of the last year. Barbabella's dismissal also raises some curious questions, saying it's a common side-effect of "aspirin therapy," but it's not clear from at least our public understanding of the president's health (more on that below) that he should be on "aspirin therapy."

2) The pattern changes. Donald Trump is basically the most habit-bound and routine-bound man we know in American politics. And yet we've seen some major departures of his routine in recent weeks " including, not least of all, that he stuck in Washington all this weekend. Trump takes off for one of his golf resorts the first chance he can nearly every weekend of the year, and yet he's just choosing to spend an extra-long holiday weekend hanging out at the White House? Why? Is his medical team wanting to keep him closer to top secure medical facilities?

At the August 22nd Oval Office event where photos of Trump's bruised hands went viral, I was struck by something else " as Public Notice was too: The oddity of Trump appearing tie-less. In fact, all the men in the photo op are not wearing their ties, making clear that this was a coordinated decision to align with the president's sartorial choice. Trump effectively never appears in the Oval Office without a tie " remember how they berated Zelenskyy for appearing in the Oval Office without a suit earlier this year? Scroll back through the summer and there appears to be no recent precedent for the president NOT wearing a tie in the Oval Office. It also is a rare " if not unprecedented " time that he wears a hat while sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. So for this one event, one where the president's ill health appears on very public display, he and everyone else in the event, including JD Vance, chooses to go tie-less and he also wears a hat? At the very least, it would cause me to ask around about what else was going with Donald Trump on August 22nd?

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